Laurie Kirk, a researcher who served as a reverse engineer at Microsoft for four years and is now employed at Google, has recently rekindled the long-standing debate between Windows and Linux. From an engineering design standpoint, she holds the view that the Windows NT kernel continues to be an "engineering marvel," excelling over Linux in numerous respects. Moreover, she audaciously predicts that if Microsoft had introduced an "Open NT" in the early 21st century, permitting large enterprises to freely modify and derive from it, the current server and cloud computing ecosystem could have taken on a dramatically different form.
